Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Initial D 4 vs. Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 3

First thing's first: the game is ridiculously expensive at PhP30 a pop. Okay, that's fair enough, but the thicker newfangled IC Card costs the equivalent of four games. Gulp.

Okay then. I buy a card, put in my usual car (a black Mazda RX-8 Type S) and go take it for a spin. There are a number of new courses now: Lake Akina is the new beginner loop track, while the previously looping Myogi has become a downhill/uphill mountain pass and thus much harder than before. At the very end of the difficulty ladder is Tsukuba. For my first few games I tried Myogi. It's much wider than the other mountain passes but it's also pretty challenging.

Unfortunately this is the biggest failing of Initial D 4: it feels almost artificially hard. While battling against Takeshi Nakazato and his R32 Skyline GT-R, I found it too easy to lose control of my drifts and I was colliding against invisible "walls" that logically should not exist. I kept losing against Nakazato no matter what I did.

I appreciate the fact that actual drifts are now part of the game, but it's nowhere near as intuitive as it should be. I doubt it's just the learning curve.

My gaming money goes to Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 3, thanks. Cheaper, more intuitive and faster to boot---the only thing I don't like is the horde of game hogs that load up PhP1000 on their cards and play the whole afternoon away.

No comments:

copyright legalese

All original post content on this blog is copyright of Juan Miguel de Leon, 2001-2010. I expressly forbid anyone to take content from my blog and post it as their own without my express permission. (Yes, it has happened before.)

The "565" blog template used on this blog is copyright Douglas Bowman of www.stopdesign.com, 2004.

The views reflected in this blog are purely the opinions of the writer and not of any affiliated associations.